Use linux. It's easier. Installed gnuplot in one line last week.
brew install gnuplot
nearly does it... there's just a library in the wrong place or something, probably some other issues too.
Trying it on Mavericks now, but have to download 2GB of Xcode first. Why, oh why?
Much easier... installation of xcode and homebrew took a couple of minutes, then three words to install gnuplot. Maybe installing Mavericks on the other macs would make sense.
Now I need to learn how to draw something with gnuplot.
Nice. You have reached the fun part.
"help" is your friend.
Things like:
plot sin(x)
should work out of the box.
So actually, I could plot a logarithmic spiral directly in Inkscape.
And the Inkscape output PDF+latex is just magical. Who needs gnuplot, complete waste of time!